Scarlet
I hadn't expected Declan to approach me like that—so calm, so vulnerable. For years, he'd been the one who kept his distance, never saying the things that mattered. Yet there he was, standing in front of me, his voice raw with regret, as if he thought that a simple apology could undo the years of silence between us.
I replayed his words in my mind over and over, as if I could make sense of them, as if they could somehow heal the jagged pieces of my heart. “I should have stopped it. Stopped him.” I squeezed my eyes shut, but no matter how hard I tried, I couldn’t erase the past. The past that had been burned into my skin, etched in my memory, a fire that never quite went out.
But Declan’s apology—it wasn’t just an apology. It was a plea, a cry for redemption. And it shook me in
